Cracks in BBC ranks as reporter hits out at 'coercion'

By Tom Leonard and Matt Born

12:01AM BST 14 Aug 2003

New cracks appeared in the BBC's attempts to show a united front to the Hutton Inquiry yesterday when a Newsnight journalist complained that she had come under "considerable pressure" from superiors to reveal David Kelly as the source for her reports on the Government's Iraqi weapons dossier.

Susan Watts, the programme's science editor, claimed she was so concerned by the level of coercion from Richard Sambrook, the director of news, and other senior executives that she took independent legal advice.

She claimed the corporation also tried to "mould" her stories so they would corroborate Andrew Gilligan's story for the Today programme.

She said she felt this was a "misguided and false" strategy as she believed there were "significant differences" between Mr Gilligan's report and the two stories she produced for Newsnight based on conversations with Dr Kelly.

"I felt under some considerable pressure to reveal my source. I also felt the purpose of that was to help corroborate the Andrew Gilligan allegations and not for any proper news purpose," she told the inquiry.

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"I was most concerned that there was an attempt to mould them so that they were corroborative which I felt was misguided and false."

The differences, she claimed, were that she never named Alastair Campbell and she did not claim that anyone in the Government had inserted into the dossier the claim that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes.

Miss Watts's testimony did Mr Gilligan no favours as she appeared to cast some doubt on his reporting skills.

However, BBC colleagues were shocked when, asked if she had anything else to tell the inquiry, Miss Watts launched into a diatribe attacking her treatment by her superiors.

Miss Watts has chosen to be represented at the inquiry by her own lawyer - paid for by the corporation - rather than by the BBC's legal team.

She said she had revealed Dr Kelly's name in confidence to the editor of Newsnight, George Entwistle, so that he had the confidence to run the story.

However, she said she did not believe it was appropriate to tell anyone else as she had a duty to protect his name.

Consequently, when pressed by Mr Sambrook to reveal the name to him, she refused. She also refused when he asked if she was prepared to confirm or deny a name which he would put to her.

Miss Watts said she had given Mr Sambrook some "snippets" about Dr Kelly but had been wary as she feared he could have been identified through a process of "triangulation" as people put evidence from different reports together.

Her reticence changed, however, when Dr Kelly appeared before the Commons foreign affairs select committee and told MPs that he had not been the source for the Newsnight stories.

She claimed his testimony "relieved" her of her obligation to protect her source and she admitted she would have confirmed his identity if she had been summoned to give evidence to the committee.

She finally told senior BBC executives that Dr Kelly was her source on Friday July 18 after Dr Kelly had gone missing and a body, believed to be his, had been found.

Called later to give evidence to the inquiry, Mr Sambrook insisted there had been no attempt to "mould" Miss Watts's story to corroborate the Mr Gilligan report.

"Having seen Miss Watts's reports on Newsnight, I was struck by the similarity to the allegations in Andrew Gilligan's report and it seemed highly likely that they had come from the same person," he said.

"It would have been irresponsible of me not to try to find out if this was the same source and, if so, what had been said."

He said he had asked Miss Watts to identify her source but when she refused - a position he said he respected - he went to Mr Entwistle.

Mr Entwistle told Mr Sambrook that he was torn between his loyalties to his reporter and his employer and was "agonising" over the situation. Mr Sambrook replied by email that, under the circumstances, he would withdraw the request.

In fact, Mr Sambrook was almost certain long before Dr Kelly's unmasking that the sources for the two stories were the same person.

The inquiry was also shown a flurry of letters between Mr Campbell, Downing Street's director of communications, and Mr Sambrook that showed the extent of No 10's anger with much of the BBC's news coverage.

One letter from Mr Campbell, listing alleged mistakes in the BBC's reporting of the war in Afghanistan, was headed "Catalogue of Lies".

While Mr Sambrook said it was "not quite fair" to say the BBC had got "fed up" with the volume of complaints from Downing Street, the corporation's exasperation was clear in various internal emails.

In one of them, Kevin Marsh, the editor of Today, told a superior that he had reread a point Mr Campbell had made in a letter complaining about the dossier story. "I am more convinced than I was before that he [Campbell] is on the run or gone bonkers or worse," he wrote.

BBC executives may be annoyed as much by Miss Watts's attack on their behaviour as by the apparent inconsistencies in her portrayal of Mr Gilligan's original report.

By listing the "very significant differences" between their stories, she implied that Mr Gilligan included the name of Mr Campbell in his report. However, he only did so in a subsequent article for the Mail on Sunday.

She also implied that he described his source as "a member of the intelligence services". This too was wrong as Mr Gilligan referred to him as "a British official involved in the preparation of the dossier".

Miss Watts also claimed that Mr Gilligan said the 45-minute claim was "inserted" in the September dossier - another misrepresentation of his report, which used the less damning verb "included".